Effective warped brane-world compactification with a Gauss-Bonnet term

By including a Gauss-Bonnet interaction term into the brane-world effective action we give linear and non-linear treatments of the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity in warped spacetimes, where spacetime background can be described as a 3-brane embedded in an anti-de Sitter space of dimensions D ≥ 5 or as an intersection of higher dimensional branes with a four-dimensional brane intersection. Basically we deal with brane-world scenarios involving Minkowski branes and show that a four-dimensional graviton propagator at long distances on the brane (or intersection thereof) gives the zero-energy solution, which corresponds to a localized massless graviton on the brane. For branes coupled to a scalar field, the Gauss-Bonnet term alone may not give a complete resolution of the singularity problem, however, there can exist a Randall-Sundrum type compactification. Importantly, the previously known “no-go” arguments for warped brane-world compactifications are not available with a Gauss-Bonnet term.